Thomas Wolfe: Of Time and the River, You Can't Go Home Again & Look Homeward, Angel. Thomas Wolfe
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joke on us? Maybe we’re dreaming all this. Do you think so?”
“Yes,” said Eugene, “I do. But I wish they’d wake us up.” He was silent, brooding over his thin bare body, bent forward on the bed for a moment. “Maybe,” he said slowly, “maybe — there’s nothing, nobody to wake.”
“To hell with it all!” said Ben. “I wish it were over.”
Eugene returned to Pulpit Hill in a fever of war excitement. The university had been turned into an armed camp. Young men who were eighteen years old were being admitted into the officers’ training corps. But he was not yet eighteen. His birthday was two weeks off. In vain he implored the tolerance of the examining board. What did two weeks matter? Could he get in as soon as his birthday arrived? They told him he could not. What, then, could he do? They told him that he must wait until there was another draft. How long would that be? Only two or three months, they assured him. His wilted hope revived. He chafed impatiently. All was not lost.
By Christmas, with fair luck, he might be eligible for service in khaki: by Spring, if God was good, all the proud privileges of trench-lice, mustard gas, spattered brains, punctured lungs, ripped guts, asphyxiation, mud and gangrene, might be his. Over the rim of the earth he heard the glorious stamp of the feet, the fierce sweet song of the horns. With a tender smile of love for his dear self, he saw himself wearing the eagles of a colonel on his gallant young shoulders. He saw himself as Ace Gant, the falcon of the skies, with 63 Huns to his credit by his nineteenth year. He saw himself walking up the Champs–Elysées, with a handsome powdering of gray hair above his temples, a left forearm of the finest cork, and the luscious young widow of a French marshal at his side. For the first time he saw the romantic charm of mutilation. The perfect and unblemished heroes of his childhood now seemed cheap to him — fit only to illustrate advertisements for collars and toothpaste. He longed for that subtle distinction, that air of having lived and suffered that could only be attained by a wooden leg, a rebuilt nose, or the seared scar of a bullet across his temple.
Meanwhile, he fed voraciously, and drank gallons of water in an effort to increase his poundage. He weighed himself a half-dozen times a day. He even made some effort at systematic exercise: swinging his arms, bending from his hips, and so on.
And he talked about his problem with the professors. Gravely, earnestly, he wrestled with his soul, mouthing with gusto the inspiring jargon of the crusade. For the present, said the professors, was his Place not Here? Did his Conscience tell him that he Had to go? If it did, they said gravely, they would say nothing more. But had he considered the Larger Issues?
“Is not,” said the Acting Dean persuasively, “is not this your Sector? Is your own Front Line not here on the campus? Is it not here that you must Go Over The Top? Oh, I know,” he went on with a smile of quiet pain, “I know it would be easier to go. I have had to fight that battle myself. But we are all part of the Army now; we are all enlisted in the Service of Liberty. We are all Mobilized for Truth. And each must Do His Bit where it will count for most.”
“Yes,” said Eugene, with a pale tortured face, “I know. I know it’s wrong. But oh, sir — when I think of those murderous beasts, when I think of how they have menaced All that we Hold Dear, when I think of Little Belgium, and then of My Own Mother, My Own Sister —” He turned away, clenching his hands, madly in love with himself.
“Yes, yes,” said the Acting Dean gently, “for boys with a spirit like yours it’s not easy.”
“Oh, sir, it’s hard!” cried Eugene passionately. “I tell you it’s hard.”
“We must endure,” said the Dean quietly. “We must be tempered in the fire. The Future of Mankind hangs in the balance.”
Deeply stirred they stood together for a moment, drenched in the radiant beauty of their heroic souls.
Eugene was managing editor of the college paper. But, since the editor was enlisted in the corps, the entire work of publication fell to the boy. Every one was in the army. With the exception of a few dozen ratty Freshmen, a few cripples, and himself, every one, it seemed, was in the army. All of his fraternity brothers, all of his college mates, who had not previously enlisted, and many young men who had never before thought of college, were in the army. “Pap” Rheinhart, George Graves, Julius Arthur — who had experienced brief and somewhat unfortunate careers at other universities, and a host of young Altamonters who had never known a campus before, were all enlisted now in the Student’s Army.
During the first days, in the confusion of the new order, Eugene saw a great deal of them. Then, as the cogs of the machine began to grind more smoothly, and the university was converted into a big army post, with its punctual monotony of drilling, eating, studying, inspection, sleeping, he found himself detached, alone, occupying a position of unique and isolated authority.
He Carried On. He Held High the Torch. He Did His Bit. He was editor, reporter, censor, factotum of the paper. He wrote the news. He wrote the editorials. He seared them with flaming words. He extolled the crusade. He was possessed of the inspiration for murder.
He came and he went as he chose. When the barracks went dark at night, he prowled the campus, contemptuous of the electric flash and the muttered apologies of the officious shave-tails. He roomed in the village with a tall cadaver, a gaunt medical student with hollow cheeks and a pigeon-breast, named Heston. Three or four times a week he was driven over the rutted highway to Exeter where, in a little print shop, he drank the good warm smell of ink and steel.
Later, he prowled up the dreary main street of the town as the lights went up, ate at the Greek’s, flirted with a few stray furtive women until the place went dead at ten o’clock, and came back through the dark countryside in a public-service car beside a drunken old walrus who drove like a demon, and whose name was “Soak” Young.
October began, and a season of small cold rain. The earth was a sodden reek of mud and rotten leaves. The trees dripped wearily and incessantly. His eighteenth birthday came, and he turned again, with a quivering tension, toward the war.
He got a brief sick letter from his father; a few pages, practical, concrete with her blunt pungent expression, from Eliza:
“Daisy has been here with all her tribe. She went home two days ago, leaving Caroline and Richard. They have all been down sick with the flu. We’ve had a siege of it here. Every one has had it, and you never know who’s going to be next. It seems to get the big strong ones first. Mr. Hanby, the Methodist minister, died last week. Pneumonia set in. He was a fine healthy man in the prime of life. The doctors said he was gone from the start. Helen has been laid up for several days. Says it’s her old kidney trouble. They had McGuire in Thursday night. But they can’t fool me, no matter what they say. Son, I hope you will never surrender to that awful craving. It has been the curse of my life. Your papa seems to go along about the same as usual. He eats well, and gets lots of sleep. I can’t notice any change in him from a year ago. He may be here long after some of the rest of us are under the sod. Ben is still here. He mopes around the house all day and complains of having no appetite. I think he needs to get to work again doing something that will take his mind off himself. There are only a few people left in the house. Mrs. Pert and Miss Newton hang on as usual. The Crosbys have gone back to Miami. If it gets much colder here I’ll just pack up and go too. I guess I must be getting old. I can’t stand the cold the way I could when I was young. I want you to buy yourself a good warm overcoat before the winter sets in. You must also eat plenty of good substantial food. Don’t squander your money but . . .”
He heard nothing more for several weeks. Then, one drizzling evening at six o’clock, when he returned to the room that he occupied with Heston, he found a telegram. It read: “Come home at once. Ben has pneumonia. Mother.”
35
There was no train until the next day. Heston quieted him during the evening with a stiff drink of gin manufactured from alcohol taken from the medical laboratory. Eugene